Jerre Mangione, Hon'80, a writer best known for his portrayal
of the Italian-American immigrant experience and a faculty member at the
University for many years, died in August at age 89. We asked Dr. Alan Filreis,
professor of English and an admirer of Mangione, to share some memories
of the man and his work. -- Ed.

SOME YEARS AGO, in a personal letter to Jerre Mangione,
Malcolm Cowley wrote that Mangione's Mount Allegro had had "more
lives than any other book of our time." This will continue to be true,
even after Mangione's recent death. Mount Allegro (1943) is a brilliantly
touching picture of immigrant life in Rochester, New York, and I urge it
on all readers who want to know or remember my late colleague. Sociologist
Herbert Gans admires the book because of the way Mangione successfully "commit[ed]
the oral tradition to paper." Indeed, according to Jerre, he intended
something like the nonfiction of one who records folklife. But at the last
minute his first publisher had him alter names because "fiction will
sell better," and so he was a novelist. (Even the name Mangione,
or big eater, became Amoroso, lover.) Bookstore taxonomies have defied
-- or maybe been defied by -- this marvelous work. Mislabelings of the commercial
kind almost certainly over the years confused some buyers and browsers trying
to follow word-of-mouth recommendations. I'm convinced that various award-giving
committees, stuck in categorical places, were similarly confused. My own
unsystematic count of shelving categories has found the book sold under
sociology, fiction, autobiography, humor, "adolescent fiction"
(it certainly is a Bildungsroman), folklore, ethnic studies, Italian-Americana,
memoir, and nonfiction.

Jerre's radicalism ran deeper than the bending of commercial
genres. He first visited Italy in 1936 and witnessed ways of fascist control
there. Impassioned yet graceful pieces for The New Masses, The
New Republic,Travel, and Globe described what he saw.
He became the classic "pre-mature antifascist" -- a hater of European
fascism whose disposition came too "soon" for his own American
political good. The United States was not officially antifascist, of course,
until December 1941; in the Cold-War era stretching from 1946 through the
1950s, those like Jerre who were avidly antifascist in the 1930s must have
been -- or still were -- communists or dupes of the communists. We should
all read, or re-read, Mangione's novel about the prematurity of certain
antifascisms, The Ship and the Flame (1948), a modern allegory for
European politics just prior to the almost complete collapse of democratic
will in the West.
Jerre ranged quietly yet urgently across the years and
the topics, producing "Happy Days in Fascist Italy" for the communist
New Masses in 1938, "When the Feds Were Writers" for The
New York Times in 1972, "The Fate of the Urban Ethnic" for
a book on urban experience in 1981, and "Any Italian Can Paint a Landscape"
for this magazine in 1989, to name just four periodical entries from the
many leaves of the Mangione bibliography. Published commendations of Jerre's
books, writings, and cultural projects, run together with the list of articles
and chapters about him, surely put him among the most oft-cited authors
who have graced the Penn faculty. VIA or Voices in Italian Americana in 1993 dedicated
most of an issue to Mangione's writing, a fitting tribute on the 50th anniversary
of the publication of Mount Allegro. The same year, the Library of
Congress exhibited archival materials documenting this wide-ranging career.
A year earlier, then- governor of New York Mario Cuomo presented Jerre with
the Christopher Columbus Quincentenary Award, an exciting, fitting moment
Jerre savored. Cuomo introduced Mangione with passion as "an acclaimed
spokesperson for Italian Americans and for all immigrants to this country."
Another moment Jerre savored was the formation, after
many years of advocacy, even agitation, of an Italian studies program at
Penn. He was its first director. When later Jerre published (with Ben Morreale)
a remarkably comprehensive survey of five centuries of the Italian American
experience, La Storia, he felt, rightly, that he had helped make
Italian cultural life in the U.S. special and fascinating to readers "far
beyond the boundaries of the ethnic community itself" (Werner Sollers'
phrase in lauding the book). The emergence of La Storia in 1992,
a half century after Mount Allegro, gave Phila-delphians, including
Jerre's friends at Penn, an apt opportunity to honor his life and work.
Large crowds attended readings, signing parties, and special programs such
as the celebration organized by AMICI (Friends of the Center of Italian
Studies at Penn).
In 1987 Jerre had sold his personal and professional papers
to the University of Rochester. These include notes, drafts, several drawers
of manuscripts and printed materials pertaining to the Federal Writers'
Project, correspondence with writers, public figures, tapes, photos, and
an array of fascinating ephemera (brochures, pamphlets, posters). Unpublished
letters in the Mangione Papers include those from Conrad Aiken, Louise Bogan,
Kay Boyle, Kenneth Burke, Frederick Exley, Philip Roth, May Sarton, Cowley,
and many others.
People devoted to the idea of publicly funded arts know
that Jerre Mangione was the tireless coordinating editor of the WPA Federal
Writers' Project in the late 1930s. In effect, he was the literary agent
for the project. Using contacts among New York publishers, and his considerable
charm, he was able to get the now-famous American Guide Series published
at no expense to the government and at minimal cost to people who bought
the volumes. Two of those books were The Philadelphia Guide, which
was sponsored by Penn, and The Pennsylvania Guide. Both are still
astonishingly helpful, relevant resources, as well as rich geo-sociological
histories of the region. The Dream and the Deal: The Federal Writers'
Project, 1935-43, his elegant history of the project, goes a long way
toward Jerre's aspiration that American artists would never forget how writers
on the Left (for the most part) came together to produce a lasting literary
record of what were then mostly untold versions of American stories.
The House of Representatives recently released to the
National Archives all the records of the House Un-American Activities Committee
(HUAC) for the period beginning in 1938. Now that this part of the HUAC
archive is finally open, scholars, including this one, can measure the damage
done by anticommunists to the reputation or legacy of the Federal Writers'
Project (by which I mean the Project itself, but also the very idea of such
a thing). In the same archival effort, we can take some account of the disfigurement
of writers' careers that Jerre Mangione saw for himself, including, fascinatingly,
his own.
One afternoon in 1987 I interviewed my emeritus colleague
at length. I asked him what things might have been like, for him and other
FWP writers, had Congress not cut short the life of New Deal-era federal
support of public arts projects. Jerre joked modestly that The Dream
and the Deal would have been a longer book. But then as my tape ran
he went silent for a long time, and bore a pained look. He might have been
remembering, for instance, that at the height of the Cold War, when the
New England American Studies Association gathered at Amherst College to
discuss the New Deal arts projects, an academic critic of American literature
named Barry Marks read a paper in which he argued that "the most impressive
single feature of the WPA Arts Program was its lack of respect for creativity."
For Jerre, on the contrary, "the writers and nonwriters on the project
somehow managed to play their role well, so that in spite of all the administrative
blunders, the political imbroglios, and the Congressional salvos, [we] produced
more good books than anyone dreamed [we] could." I remember Jerre Mangione
as a writer who wrote his own "good books," yes, but also as one
who made others' literally possible -- which, contra Barry Marks, was and
is the highest praise. -- Alan Filreis